Johnson: Designing homes for wounded warriors

Jan. 9, 2013

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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Beth Phillips with April and Michael Ortiz, who are expecting their first child this year. Phillips, founder of Furnishing Hope, quit her interior design business to design and furnish the homes of warriors badly wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Phillips home is her 77th one. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Beth Phillips, center, works with April and Michael Ortiz, at their Garden Grove home. Phillips, creator of Furnishing Hope, quit her interior design business to design and furnish homes of servicemen like Michael, who were badly wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. He and his wife are expecting their first child this year. "We can't do enough for them with my resources, but we will make things as comfortable as possible," Phillips said. They are pictured with their Akita puppy Captain. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Beth Phillips, at left, works with April and Michael Ortiz, of Garden Grove who are expecting their first child this year. Phillips is the founder of Furnishing Hope. She designs and furnishes the homes of warriors badly wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Interior designer Beth Phillips of Furnishing Hope, takes a picture of Michael and April Ortizs' bedroom. She will provide furnishings for the couple through her charity Furnishing Hope for warriors who have been injured in combat. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Beth Phillips with April and Michael Ortiz, who are expecting their first child this year. Phillips, founder of Furnishing Hope, quit her interior design business to design and furnish the homes of warriors badly wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Phillips home is her 77th one. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

It is a Monday afternoon when Beth Phillips walks into the little house on a corner in Westminster, the 77th wounded soldier's home she will take on, and her eyes grow wide.

There is very little inside it. "OK," she murmurs to herself.

Former Army Spc. Michael Ortiz, 24, limps over to greet her, shakes her hand and gives her a little hug as his wife, April, 21, looks on.

It is incredible to the couple that she is even here, and they do not know what to say. Embarrassed might be the proper word here. Phillips waves it all away and tells them they should get to work.

Over the coming week, she will completely furnish the four-bedroom, two-bathroom home at no cost to the couple. Doing such a thing is Phillips' life work now.

She is founder and executive director of Furnishing Hope, a nonprofit she began three years ago to provide a comfortable and functioning home for severely wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. She was alone in her furniture-filled Santa Ana warehouse the other day when I asked her how it all started.

She is 68 years old now, a professional interior designer to custom, high-end residential and commercial clients in Orange County for more than 30 years. It all started, she says, in 2004.

A client was changing over their home from traditional to modern furnishings, she recalled. When she had finally turned everything to modern, the homeowner told her to just keep the traditional items, furniture Phillips estimated to be worth more than $17,000. She gasped and began wondering what she would do with it all.

She would turn it all over to Habitat for Humanity in Costa Mesa to furnish homes it was building there. It began an eight-year relationship with Habitat, during which she, working with other designers, would furnish 60 homes for the low-income housing organization.

It was in early 2010 when she first saw and heard of badly wounded soldiers returning home from war, getting treatment at military hospitals and being released into homes with absolutely no furniture.

"They would come home and sleep on a blow-up mattress," she recalled. "That just didn't work for me."

So she quit her business and founded Furnishing Hope, which now has a five-member board and at least a dozen major donors. Recipients are selected from referrals by military family readiness officers, the American Red Cross, Veterans First and several other military organizations.

"I just saw tremendous waste and an equal need," Beth Phillips said. "I knew if I could get a group of designers together, we could make even tired, used furniture amazing. And I think we do."

Donations from designers and others fill the warehouse. On this day, though, only 25 percent of it, she says, will be of use to a wounded soldier. That large, dark-stained, practically brand-new coffee table over in the corner?

"Not useable," she says. "You have to think of a soldier in a wheelchair. For him or her to reach the sofa, it would have to be moved constantly."

Every Saturday, she opens the warehouse and sells the furniture she will not need to the public. The proceeds are then used to buy new mattresses, bedding, dishes and other items a wounded soldier can use.

Of the 76 recipients so far, their average age, she said, is 23. She keeps their photographs on a wall in her office. Almost all of them are missing limbs. Almost all of them are seated in wheelchairs.

For each house she furnishes, Living Spaces Furniture provides her a $2,500 gift card. Other items are provided by donors. When the soldier walks into his home, she says, "our goal is that all he needs to bring is a toothbrush."

Spc. Michael Ortiz was riding in a vehicle on routine patrol about 10 miles north of Baghdad in 2008 when the ground beneath him exploded. The blast flung him from the vehicle, leaving him with a closed-brain injury and severe spinal cord damage that left him paralyzed for months. He finally rose from his wheelchair six months ago.

The modest little home was awarded to him and April through the Army's Wounded Warriors program. Bank of America handed him the keys, provided he and April take three years of financial planning and other classes on how to be good homeowners. They will be responsible only for property taxes.

Still, the home has problems. A master bedroom addition has no insulation and leaks horribly when it rains, as does the non-insulated, poorly constructed family room, which once had been an open-air rear patio.

"I haven't spoken with our insurers yet, but I have let the Wounded Warriors program know," Michael Ortiz says softly. He knows of his good fortune, of how he and April shared a room in his mother's basement before the bank came through for them. "We feel kind of bad asking or telling anyone about it," he says. "We figured we could handle it on our own."

Beth Phillips puts her hand on his shoulder and tells him of a subcontractor group she knows. Maybe, she tells him, she can get them to donate some materials to fix the problems.

But first, she tells them, there is her work to do. She is thinking of curtains, rugs, "things that will warm this house up," she says.

Do they like yellow?

She is thinking of the color for the nursery. April Ortiz is expecting the couple's first child in June.

"We will be grateful for anything," Michael Ortiz finally tells her, clearly taken aback by the woman's generosity.

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